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By Matthew Flinders

One of the critical skills of any student of politics — professors, journalists, public servants, writers, politicians and interested members of the public included — is to somehow look beyond or beneath the bigger headlines and instead focus on those peripheral stories that may in fact tell us far more about the changing nature of society. It was in exactly this sense that I was drawn recently not to the ‘War in Whitehall’ or Cameron’s speech on the UK’s future relationship with the European Union but to a story about the launch of a ‘smart fork’. The ‘smart’ feature being the existence of a shrill alarm which would inform its user if they were eating too quickly. This, I have quickly realized, is just the latest in a long stream of innovations that seek to nudge individuals towards making better choices about the way they lead their lives (eat less, save more, drive more slowly, etc.). And so it turns out that the ‘smart fork’ is just one of a great series of new innovations that seeks to deliver a form of liberal-paternalism by somehow reconciling individual freedom and choice with an emphasis on collective responsibility and well-being. My favorite amongst these innovations was the ‘smart trolley’: a supermarket trolley with sensors that beeped (and flashed) at the errant shopper who succumbed to the temptation to place a high-fat product in their trolley.

There was something about the idea of a smart fork, however, that I found particularly disturbing (or should I say ‘hard to swallow’, ‘stuck in my gullet’, ‘left a bad taste in my mouth’, etc.?). My mind jumped back to Michael Sandel’s argument that ‘the problem with our politics is not too much moral argument but too little…Our politics is over-heated because it is mostly vacant’. My concern with the launch of the ‘smart fork’ is that it arguably reflects an unwillingness to deal with the moral arguments that underlie the obesity endemic in large parts of the developed world. If Sandel’s concern about the imposition of market values is that it could ‘crowd out of virtue’ then my own concern is that behavioral economics revolution risks ‘crowding out thought’ in the sense that new technologies may provide little more than an excuse or displacement activity for not accepting responsibility for one’s actions. In the twenty-first century do we really need a computerized fork or shopping trolley in order to tell us to eat less food more slowly, or to buy less high-fat food and exercise more?

The smart fork therefore forms little more than a metaphor for a society that appears to have lost a sense of self-control and personal responsibility. This, in turn, pushes us back to broader arguments concerning the emptiness of modern political debate and to the relative value of the public and private sectors. As Alain de Botton argued in Citizen Ethics in a Time of Crisis, we could ask whether individual freedom has really served us so well as the leitmotif of modern life. ‘In the chaos of the liberal free market we tend to lack not so much freedom [but] the chance to use it well’ de Botton writes; ‘We lack guidance, self-understanding, self-control….being left alone to ruin our lives as we please is not a liberty worth revering’. Slavoj Žižek paints a similar argument across a broader canvas in his provocative work Living in the End Times . ‘The people wanted to have their cake and eat it’, Žižek argues; ‘they wanted capitalist democratic freedom and material abundance but without paying the full price’. He uses an advert on American TV for a chocolate laxative—‘Do you have constipation? Eat more of this chocolate’—to mock the modern public’s constant demand for results without ever having to suffer unpleasant side effects.

Although hidden far beneath the front-page headlines, the story of the launch of the smart fork (in Las Vegas — need I say more) highlights the existence of an underlying problem in the sense that most politicians appear either unwilling or unable (possibly both) to tackle the issue head-on. Between 1980 and 2000 obesity rates doubled in the United States to the extent that one in three adults (around sixty million people) are now clinically obese, with levels growing particularly amongst children and adolescents. In this context it may well be that individuals require — even want — not a nudge but a shove or a push towards a healthier lifestyle? If this is true, it is possible that we need to revisit certain baseline assumptions about the market and the state and not simply define the role of the latter as an inherently illegitimate, intrusive, and undesirable one. To make this point is not to trump the heavy hand of the state or to seek to promote some modern version of the enlightened dictator, but it is to inject a little balance into the debate about the individual and society. Is it possible that we ‘hate’ politics simply because, unlike those unfeasibly self-contained, sane, and reasonable grown-ups that we are assumed to be by liberal politicians, most of us still behave like disturbed children (or political infants) who simply don’t want to take responsibility for our actions or how they impact on the world around us? Or — to put the same point slightly differently — if the best response we have to the obesity crisis is an electric fork then in the long term we’re all forked.

Matthew Flinders is Professor of Parliamentary Government & Governance at the University of Sheffield. He was awarded the Political Communicator of the Year Award in 2012. Author of Defending Politics (2012), he is also co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of British Politics and author of Multi-Level Governance and Democratic Drift. Read more of Matthew Flinders’s blog posts and find him on Twitter @PoliticalSpike.

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The post The smart fork and the crowding out of thought appeared first on OUPblog.

By Anatoly Liberman

I would rather write about prisms and prunes, but those words are ultimately of Greek descent, and I try to stay on Germanic soil as much as possible, though sometimes the spirit of adventure (not to be encouraged in a serious etymologist) makes me trespass on Romance territory. The origin of spoon is well-known, but the story is instructive and deserves repeating.

Spoons of some sort were invented at the dawn of civilization. Liquid and soft food cannot be eaten with hands, so that spoons, contrary to forks, are a necessity, not a luxury. Human beings have fingers, that is, natural forks, and the Europeans resisted the introduction of “artificial fingers” long and manfully. The English are famous for even ridiculing forks five hundred years ago. However, by the 16th and especially the 17th century the wealthy in Italy, France, and England got used to the newfangled utensil, partly because forks could be made of costly materials and impress guests (the Italians were in the forefront of this important battle). The idea of the monstrous phrase plastic silverware could not have occurred to those nobles. The Old English noun forca ~ force betrays its origin from Latin furca “a two-pronged pitchfork,” “a stake for punishment” (hence furcifer “villain, gallows bird”), “a claw of a crayfish,” and so forth (a word for which no satisfactory etymology exists; the original root can be seen in Engl. bifurcation). In Old English, as in Latin, forca ~ force meant “pitchfork.” The earliest known mention of Engl. fork “eating utensil” traces back to 1463, and the next occurrence in the OED is dated 1554. Furca, despite its obscurity, may have been native in Latin, for such a primitive agricultural implement would have been unlikely to go by a foreign name. The other Germanic words for “pitchfork” (such as German Gabel, related to Engl. gable) and their Slavic counterparts (such as Russian vily) are also opaque from an etymological point of view, though less troublesome than furca.

Spoon is certainly native and can serve as a classic illustration of how the history of words and the history of things are connected. Old Engl. spon (with a long vowel), the etymon of spoon, meant “chip, splinter, shaving,” and this is still the meaning of German Span and one of the meanings of Dutch spaan. In Middle English, the change from “chip” to “eating utensil” probably occurred under the influence of its Scandinavian equivalent in which the same change happened earlier. The ancient spoon was a primitive sliver before it became elaborate silver. Spoons have transparent names in many languages. Latin coclear, the ancestor of French cuiller, Spanish cuchara, and Italian cucchiaio, shares the root with coclea “snail; spiral” (in our dictionaries, coclea sometimes turns up with -ch-, as do its English reflexes derived from Greek) either because of its initial twisted form or because it had pointed ends for eating shellfish. Shells as spoons have been used widely all over the world. Swedish sked (with closely related forms in all the Scandinavian languages) refers to something split or divided, as the corresponding English verb to shed and -shed in the compound watershed make clear. Dutch lepel “spoon” is an instrument for “lapping up” food.

Older than the spoon and the fork is the knife, and the origin of the words for it is sometimes lost. The easiest case is German Messer (with cognates elsewhere in Germanic). Messen “to measure” is related to Engl. mete (out). Apparently, the instrument was used for “measuring.” Meat (but not meet) is also related, for the original sense of meat was “food,” or rather “a portion ‘meted’ to the partaker.” But Engl. knife is enigmatic despite the fact that almost identical forms exist in several Germanic languages (compare Dutch knijf). Old English had cnif (here again with a long vowel); however, the word surfaced late and seems to have been borrowed from Scandinavian. When knife came into existence, k was pronounced in it, as in Modern Engl. acknowledge, for example. Germanic words with initial kn- and gn- are numerous; today the spelling of Engl. knock, gnaw, and the like reminds us of medieval sound values but confuses learners. In the written form of some words, initial k- and g- have been abolished.

Although the nouns and verbs that at one time began with kn- and gn- show some similarity in meaning, their common semantic denominator is evasive. At least some of them refer to a light, quick movement (nudge, for instance). Knife may be part of that group, and Skeat saw no reason for separating it from nip and nibble. Everything depends on the purpose of the original knife. If in the remote past it denoted a stabbing tool or weapon, a kind of bayonet, its name will align itself easily with many other kn- words. But the prehistory of our object is hidden. According to a daring hypothesis, knife is a loan from Basque. (I need hardly remind our readers that linguistic loans are permanent and that the lending language does not become poorer after sharing its riches with a neighbor. Borrow is a remarkably inappropriate term in this context; take over makes better sense.) Words for tools are often “borrowed,” because they travel from land to land with the objects they designate. Thus, foreign axes, adzes, hatchets, and their likes come to new countries, and their names seldom resist domestication. With knives it happens rarely, if at all. In any case, we do not know to what uses the object called knife was put when its name emerged and are likely to remain in the dark forever. It is important to remember that, in order to discover the etymology of a word, we must know exactly what the word means. Plato, or perhaps Socrates before him, already realized this connection, but in our work we are apt to forget it.